Winners & Losers

The Gaza war and its fallout.

Elliott Abrams

December 3, 2012, Vol. 18, No. 12

If the truce announced in Cairo last Wednesday truly brings the Gaza war to a close, it is not too soon to assess who gained and who lost from this conflict.

Hamas

Hamas provoked the war and chose the timing, so it is not surprising that they thought they would gain—and they have gained. The PLO initiative in the United Nations (to be classified as a “non-member observer state”) was shifting energy to the West Bank leadership, and by these attacks on Israel Hamas shifted it back. President Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies in Ramallah barely made the papers, despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit there. They were marginalized while Arab leaders and Turkish officials visited Gaza, and Hamas leaders traveled to Cairo for high-publicity meetings. The PLO leadership in Ramallah is one of the big losers of the last few weeks.

The effect of this will play out in the coming months. Given Hamas’s control of Gaza, any peace negotiations in 2013 with the “Ramallah leadership” under President Abbas are clearly going to be limited to increasing Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank rather than creating a Palestinian state. It is ironic that Palestinians may achieve U.N. recognition of a unified and sovereign Palestinian state at almost exactly the moment when such a state seems further away than ever.

The danger is that Hamas will increasingly be seen as a potential negotiating partner by governments around the world. No doubt many think tanks and “experts” will be repeating that we must reach out, be realistic, and understand that Hamas must be “engaged” if peace is to be attained. If Hamas begins to be treated not as a terrorist group but as an entity equal in legitimacy to the PLO—and for that matter to Israel—it will be the first terrorist group to achieve such status without disarming and while maintaining its loathsome charter and revanchist goals.

What remains to be seen is whether those Hamas gains came at too high a cost for the group. Hamas is a terrorist organization that was able to fire at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem only because Iran supplied it with the Fajr longer-range missiles. But during this conflict Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, consistently separated Egypt’s interests from those of Hamas. He did not go to Gaza during the war, did not break relations with Israel, and did not threaten to cancel the peace treaty. It was clear that he did not want the tail to wag the dog—did not want the leaders of 1.5 million Gazans to harm the interests of 85 million Egyptians. He did not want a ground war that might have forced his hand on relations with Israel, and he does not want to see acts of terrorism against Israel launched from Egyptian territory.

Significantly, Morsi’s position appears to be that of the MB as an institution. During the war, Khairat al-Shater, perhaps the single strongest leader in the Brotherhood (and its initial candidate for president), sharply criticized Hamas in a meeting of the MB leadership reported in the newspaper Al-Ahram. Al-Shater denounced Hamas for entangling Egypt in a potential conflict with Israel, and said the army must do a better job of stopping the smuggling of arms into Gaza. People who create crises between Egypt and the West and threaten the vital foreign aid Egypt needs are working against Egypt’s interests, he said.

If this separation of Hamas’s interests from Egypt’s means Egyptian soldiers will now police the Gaza-Sinai border and prevent Iran from shipping replacement missiles into Gaza, Hamas will have paid a heavy price for the week of conflict. Getting Egypt to close the smuggling tunnels and police the border should be a main goal of U.S. diplomacy. After the last Gaza war, in December 2008-January 2009, Egypt under President Mubarak failed completely in this task. It will be ironic if the new Muslim Brotherhood government does a better job (and one hopes a by-product will be an end to Israeli mourning for Mubarak’s departure).

Egypt

It must be said that Egypt is a winner in the conflict. It served as the capital of the Arab world and the center of Middle Eastern diplomacy during the war, with Secretary Clinton, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, and officials from the Arab world, Turkey, and Europe shuttling in and out. Turkey and Qatar could not negotiate an agreement to end the fighting; Egypt did, because of its weight as the largest Arab nation, the legitimacy of its newly elected MB government, and its continuing ties with Israel. The last two weeks restored some of Egypt’s lost luster as the diplomatic center of the Arab world. The truce was announced in Cairo—not Doha or Ankara.

Israel

Both Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerge as winners. Polls last week showed that Netanyahu’s support in Israel (which will hold elections on January 22) had risen, and conversations with Israeli leaders confirm the poll numbers. A large majority of Israelis supported the airstrikes on Gaza but also supported the decision not to go in on the ground. Netanyahu is widely viewed as having shown the proper combination of strength and caution, and none of his rivals broke into double digits in polls asking “who is fit to handle Israel’s security challenges” or “who should lead.” For this reason former prime minister Ehud Olmert will not (and perhaps by the time this article is published will have announced that he will not) try for a comeback by running against Netanyahu. Israelis have appreciated that Netanyahu avoided bombastic statements, and used the days of conflict to reach out to President Obama and restore a working relationship with him. Israelis realize this conflict did not “solve” the problem of Hamas control of Gaza and that in a few years there may be another round. But they did not expect Netanyahu to pull off a magic act; they wanted sensible, competent leadership, and they got it.

Israel was a winner for two reasons. First, the countries about which Israelis care—the United States, Canada, and European nations—understood Hamas made this war happen and Israel had no choice but to defend its population. These governments did not want to see a ground war and now credit the government of Israel with prudent management of the conflict. Netanyahu may not be personally popular, and of course most EU leaders favor Israel’s left-of-center parties, but Israel will have gained a reputation for moderation. Much of the European media may echo Hamas propaganda and dwell on injuries to civilians in Gaza, but the prime ministers and foreign ministers know better.

Second, it is a real gain for Israel that the supply of Fajr missiles by Iran to Hamas may remind European leaders and our own—as does the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah soldiers in Syria—that Iran lies at the heart of the region’s troubles. Once the Israeli election is over and Netanyahu forms a new coalition, roughly around March 1, he will no doubt travel to Washington to discuss the central issue facing the Middle East and his own country: the Islamic Republic. The nuclear program is the top problem, but it is not the only one. Netanyahu will be able to remind the president of something that Gulf Arab leaders have insistently been saying: that the Iranian regime, and not just its nuclear program, is the problem. A nuclear deal that leaves Iran free to engage in subversion throughout the region, sending soldiers to Syria or missiles to Gaza, eliminates only one form of danger—though the greatest and most pressing one.

Rerun the Gaza war in your mind, only this time with Iran rolling out nuclear-tipped missiles and threatening that “an Israeli ground assault in Gaza would be viewed as an attack on all Muslims,” “the Zionist entity must be wiped off the map,” and similar threats. Just words today, but how does Israel handle them if Iran actually has a nuclear bomb and a workable delivery system? This war is likely to lead Israel’s leaders to press ahead with all their missile defense programs, but also to confirm their belief that Iran must be stopped—at all costs.

If one or two years from now Iran has attained a nuclear weapon and Hamas has a few hundred Fajr missiles in its warehouses, this war will rightly be seen as just one more step toward control of the region by radical forces and toward the undermining of Israel’s strategic situation. But if this week of conflict has persuaded Egypt’s new leaders that their border with Hamas must be policed, and has reminded Arabs, Israelis, and Americans alike that Iran must be stopped before it sows more conflicts in the region and gets the bomb, it will have proved a historic miscalculation by Iran and Hamas.

That outcome is possible, and depends substantially on what President Obama made of it all. He saw his “pivot to Asia” interrupted by war in the Middle East—and was forced to talk about Gaza when he spoke in Bangkok, and to break his secretary of state off the trip. The administration’s rhetoric, from Obama down, was solidly behind Israel throughout the war. What policy toward Iran that portends for 2013 will determine whether Israel or the Islamic Republic emerges as the ultimate winner or loser.